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On Jan 18, 2004, at 11:29 AM, Tim Bray wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2004, at 6:57 AM, Michael Champion wrote:
>
>
> Oh please please, tell me which software company you can call when
> something breaks and be sure of an immediate response that's of any
> use to man or beast. I haven't encountered any such organization.
> -Tim
>
As I understand it, that's pretty much what you get in return for
buying maintenance on mainframe software for $50K/processor/year or
whatever. Not having ever been a mainframe end user, and since that
licensing model generates the revenue that supports the standards and
evangelism stuff that I have been getting paid to do with a good bit of
my time , take that with as many grains of salt as you wish.
The only people who pay that kind of money are those who lose millions
of dollars per hour when their core IT systems are down. (Like
telephone companies). I will guess that as XML gets insinuated deeper
and deeper into IT infrastructures and as the technology becomes more
and more of a commodity, the main thing that will differentiate
commercial organizations that write XML processing software or support
open source software is fast and useful support. I just think it's
semi-plausible that someone might do what was suggested and
test/package/support open source software and somehow sell that to
companies with very conservative management who need what XML (or
related stuff like RSS/Atom) offers but don't have the stomach for the
chaos.
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